There are many things that confuse me. Power Series in Calculus confuse me. Jake Gyllanhal’s Golden Globe nomination for Love and Other Drugs confuses me. The inner-workings of CDs really confuse me. Add The Village Voice’s latest cover story to that list.
The article “Real Men Get Their Facts Straight” takes a punch at Actors Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore’s new foundation, The Demi and Ashton Foundation, known as DNA. The story criticizes Kutcher and Moore for using the common statistic that 100,000-300,000 children are at risk for trafficking in the US despite concrete evidence that this number is correct.
June 29 - July 5 Issue of The Village Voice
The Village Voice attempts investigative journalism, but ends up with a series of underdeveloped and disorganized attacks. Instead of delving right into the issue of faulty statistics, the Village Voice detours to take personal jabs at Ashton Kutcher, whose former television personalities, as far as I’m concerned, have no relevance to his role as an activist. Sidetracked, the Voice can’t make up its mind whether it’s disputing the statistic itself, the way it is used, or Kutcher’s television career and status as a celebrity. Confusing? I know.
What The Village Voice should be critiquing is Kutcher’s failure to cite the statistic as the number of children at risk rather than those trafficked. DNA, and many major news publications, is guilty of that misinterpretation. Instead, The Village Voice shows how hard it has worked to try and bring down Kutcher in any way possible. They spent two whole months (!) researching law enforcement data and examining juvenile prostitution arrests in the 37 largest US cities. The Voice concludes that there is an average of 827 underage arrests annually, which makes the numbers 100,000-300,000 seem ludicrously high. Of course the latter statistic blows the former out of proportion; it’s not measuring the same thing. Child prostitution arrests have no direct correlation to how many trafficked children exist when you consider the weak police efforts to find victims. It is poor reporting to generalize a statistic concerning juvenile arrests as the number of children trafficked.
There’s a silver lining to this heated debate. The issue of child trafficking has been thrown into mainstream media, where it should be. Media 4 Humanity deeply believes that awareness is one of the key strategies to combating human trafficking. Many anti-trafficking organizations, such as ECPAT USA, have galvanized behind Kutcher, arguing that 100,000-300,000 children at risk is the commonly accepted statistic because no better data exists, calling attention to this problem. Well-informed readers hopefully realize The Village Voice is a walking contradiction with an article downplaying child trafficking in the front and adult ads in the back.
After all the fight words (read: tweets) have subdued, common feeling is that the numbers don’t necessarily matter. Let this feud represent something greater than a numbers game. Let it show the necessity for accurate data and reporting on an issue that is contaminating our nation—whether it’s 30 or 300,000 children in trouble. And let’s leave Kutcher’s stint on That ‘70s Show out of it, please.
–Kate Brennan
Media 4 Humanity: Blog 